The World Bank tried for decades to implement Green Revolution programs in poor African countries, and these efforts not only failed, but left increased levels of inequality, landlessness, and ecological damage in their wake.39 AGRA policies are more sophisticated than the 1980s World Bank policies, but they trot out the same traditional-modern dichotomy, in which traditional (read: Backward) African farming practices are to blame for African poverty and malnutrition—a claim that doesn’t hold up to empirical scrutiny.40 Thus, African farmers should follow the modern (read: Smart) practices of Western farmers to increase productivity and pull themselves out of poverty.41
AGRA is an ongoing program and has generated sustained criticism from activists and political leaders around the world. In October 2014, representatives from six African countries and more than a dozen US food sovereignty groups convened the Africa–US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit in Seattle. But the outcry against AGRA has had little impact, because the foundation has the resources to pursue any policy goals it wishes. It has used its money to gain support inside the UN and from numerous other foundations and private donors, and it is accountable to no one other than Bill and Melinda Gates. The Gateses play down their power by situating themselves within a global network of partners that includes farmers and community groups, but the farmers who would supposedly benefit from the program have almost no voice in it.

…

These new seeds will be supplied by new, local private seed retailers in formal seed markets and protected by intellectual property rights. The new “certified” seeds will require increased pesticide use, so the foundation is also supporting the creation of pesticide markets. (The Gates’s ownership of 500,000 shares in Monsanto may partially explain their enthusiasm for genetically modified seeds.)
When AGRA was announced it sparked an outcry from scientists, development scholars, and food sovereignty activists from both the Global South and North.38 They argue that the Green Revolution hasn’t passed over Africa, as AGRA’s title suggests. The World Bank tried for decades to implement Green Revolution programs in poor African countries, and these efforts not only failed, but left increased levels of inequality, landlessness, and ecological damage in their wake.39 AGRA policies are more sophisticated than the 1980s World Bank policies, but they trot out the same traditional-modern dichotomy, in which traditional (read: Backward) African farming practices are to blame for African poverty and malnutrition—a claim that doesn’t hold up to empirical scrutiny.40 Thus, African farmers should follow the modern (read: Smart) practices of Western farmers to increase productivity and pull themselves out of poverty.41
AGRA is an ongoing program and has generated sustained criticism from activists and political leaders around the world.

…

“On the assumption that commercially successful systems equal food security and social well-being,” AGRA is proposing that African farmers (most of whom are too poor to buy seeds at any price) buy and use genetically modified seeds, which they are not allowed to reuse or share, as they have done for thousands of years.43 There are serious ecological and developmental dangers in monoculture farming, and agro-ecologists worry about the growing crisis in US and European farming models. All of these problems are brushed aside in the AGRA initiative. The right of countries and their populations to food sovereignty is ignored. People from the West are experts, and African farmers are thought to be too poor and oppressed to come up with solutions and strategies.
The example of education in the United States is much the same. The Gateses and other education reformers have decided that the public education system in this country is broken. They say this over and over. It’s broken, and they will fix it.

That was enough to set off the protests.
The Organic Consumers of America sent 10,000 emails damning Monsanto. Doudou Pierre, the “grassroots” National Coordinating Committee Member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security, said: “We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals.”1 U.S. writer Beverly Bell explains: “The Haitian social movement’s concern is not just about the dangers of chemicals and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for consumption, in what is called food sovereignty.”2 Church groups in the U.S. donated some 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes to, I guess, encourage traditional agriculture in Haiti. It’s worth noting that defenders of “traditional agriculture” are usually several generations removed from its practice.

…

option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=418; Josh Brem-Wilson. 2010 The Reformed Committee on World Food Security. A Briefing Paper for Civil Society (Section 1) http://www.foodsovereignty.org/Portals/0/documenti%20sito/Home/News/reformed%20CFS_english.pdf; and the websites of organizations such as La Via Campesina http://viacampesina.org/en/ and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty http://www.foodsovereignty.org/.
7 See, among others, Peter Rosset. 2008. “Food Sovereignty and the Contemporary Food Crisis.” Development 51 (4): 460–463.
8 Standard statements to this effect are found in Oakland Institute. 2008. The Food Crisis and Latin America, Policy Brief http://media.oaklandinstitute.org/content/food-crisis-and-latin-america; and Frederic Mousseau. 2010. The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger.

…

The EU recently allowed the planting of a genetically modified potato, and even though this tuber was intended for paper production and not for human consumption, the Italian Agriculture minister protested, vowing to “defend and safeguard traditional agriculture and citizen’s health.” It is no coincidence that the mention of “traditional agriculture” was given precedence in the Minister’s statement. The reluctance of much of the world to adopt biotechnology is not about the safety of the seed, but rather the preservation of “traditional agriculture” and what the Haitian protesters called food sovereignty. In large parts of the world, local trumps science, and people suffer as a result.
The Obama administration has had much to say about local food. The First Lady has planted a garden, organic, of course, and the Department of Agriculture is spending 50 million or so on a program called Know Your Farmer. The effort is likely to disappoint: in fact, a suburban housewife determined to know this corn farmer is likely to be mortified by my looks, the way I smell, and my opinions.

Besides, the ecological costs linked to international transport do not seem
to be factored in by Fair Trade. By encouraging countries of the South to
export specific goods (those produced in the North mainly), Fair Trade
seems to paradoxically contribute to increasing human pressure on the
environment. Finally, Fair Trade seems not to encourage relocation of
production processes. It encourages producers in the South to promote
cash crops at the expense of subsistence crops. This threatens their food
sovereignty and slows the adoption of more autonomous modes of living.
This strategy also contributes to the depletion of soils under the pressure
of productivist agriculture.
Conclusion
The objections to Fair Trade that I have reviewed are often irreconcilable
with one another because they stem from radically opposed doctrinal
approaches. Nevertheless, whether or not we agree with their premises,
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the fair trade scandal
each has an undeniable merit.

…

If developing countries themselves do not have the means to establish
these social safety nets in favour of their populations, it would be
unreasonable to expect this from Fair Trade; yet it is worth noting this,
if only to demonstrate the limits of its approach. This being said, a second
best solution and one that is less demanding could be, for instance, to
encourage economic diversification and the achievement of the food
sovereignty objective. In the absence of social safety nets, this initiative
would at least enable producers and their families to possibly enjoy
several sources of income and to reduce their food dependency. In the FT
approach, these objectives are considered as secondary. Even though their
importance may be recognised, they remain subordinate to the export of
products in demand by the market. In principle, the FT system boosts
economic diversification if the income effect – financial gains collected,
freeing up time and inputs for other forms of production – is higher
than the substitution effect (the income increase from Fairtrade leads to
specialisation in FT products and the phasing out of other production).

…

This would be of little consequence, as
for some such countries, only a limited number of agricultural products
account for export revenue. For countries in this situation, it is crucial
in the first instance to facilitate market access and to (re)introduce
income stabilisation mechanisms. Beyond this, enhancing agricultural
productivity should generally be encouraged for a number of reasons.
Through this approach, they would first and foremost ensure food
sovereignty and security, especially in countries with dynamic demography.
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conclusion
This in turn can reduce the cost of food products for populations, alleviate
the trade balance and facilitate a channelling of export revenue towards
the import of basic intermediate goods. Refocusing agriculture around
domestic concerns is, in my view, more profitablefor LDCs in the long term
than an economic growth model based on agricultural exports.

Extractable in principle only, best practices
bring with them the ends and values with which they are imbricated;
by the experts’ own accounts, these are market values. Meanwhile,
the aims they replace could include those of educating citizens and
developing human beings with those of meeting investor or consumer demand in a university; or those of vitalizing democracy or
securing the health of the indigent with those of compressing costs
in municipal agencies; or those of producing food sovereignty, war
recovery, sustainable resource use or access to the arts with those of
branding and competitive positioning for nonprofits and NGOs. Of
course best practices are selected and tailored for specific features
or challenges of an operation — customer service, employee-driven
product innovation, downsizing, management restructuring, outsourcing — but the criterion for a best practice is its help in achieving
competitive advantage.

…

Organic, diversified, low-cost, ecologically sustainable wheat production in Iraq is finished.68
Half the free wheat seeds distributed in post-Saddam Iraq were
for bread wheat; the other half was for pasta wheat, and pasta is no
part of the Iraqi diet.69 Thus, in addition to making Iraqi farmers
dependent on giant corporations whose seeds, licensing, and chemicals they must now purchase annually (and for which state subsidies
P o l i t i c a l R at i o n a l i t y a n d G o v e rn a n c e 145
are available, while other farm subsidies were eliminated), they were
being transformed from multicrop local food providers into monocrop
participants in global import-export markets.70 Today, Iraqi farmers
generate profits for Monsanto by supplying pasta to Texas school cafeterias, while Iraq has become an importer of staples formerly grown
on its own soil.
There is more to this heartbreaking story of the destruction of thousands of years of sustainable agriculture and of what some activists
call “food sovereignty,” but let us fast-forward to one possible future.
A similar experiment took place in India in the 1990s.71 Tens of thousands of farmers were lured into using genetically modified cotton
seed by village-to-village agribusiness representatives promising bigger crops with export potential, something especially important at
a time when neoliberal reforms were eliminating government price
supports and subsidies for cotton production.

…

Thus, while it is certainly possible to imagine more ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable practices for Iraqi agriculture, these would be at odds with global markets and competition,
148 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s
intellectual property rights, and new financing conventions, not to
mention modernized agricultural techniques. Farming practices that
are organic, biodiverse, small scale, cooperative, free of debt financing, and aimed at generating “food sovereignty” for the nation might
be sensible from the perspective of how Iraqi wheat production could
draw on past knowledge, materials, and techniques for a sustainable
future. But insofar as they would make Iraq an outlier in the global
economy, they could not qualify as best practices.
Also visible in this story is the specific meshing of state and business aims through neoliberal governance, a meshing that exceeds the
interlocking directorates or quid pro quo arrangements familiar from
past iterations of capitalism.

Since the draconian structural adjustment
policies increasingly imposed on developing countries from the
1980s, movements of self-protection against big capital’s tendency
to drive people from the land and to leave them hungry have been
particularly important. Now they are even more necessary as food
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prices rise globally, and this is why Via Campesina and the
Brazilian Landless Workers Movement have been so successful. Via
Campesina’s call for “food sovereignty” is essentially an effort to
find ways of insulating the rural poor from the rapaciousness of
global capitalism by rebuilding healthy rural communities that are,
at least to some degree, self-sufficient. At the same time, given the
violent and exploitative history of colonialism and imperialism, and
the devastation that this history has caused throughout the global
South, it is also necessary to think about longer-term means to
significantly redistribute wealth on a global scale – a redistribution
that will only become possible and effective to the extent that
international cooperation is far more advanced than it is today.

In the search for an alternative paradigm, Africa should
revisit key documents, such as the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA),
the African Alternative Framework to SAPs (AAF-SAPs), the
Arusha Declaration on popular participation, and the Abuja
Treaty, among others. An update of these documents and the
integration of contributions made by the struggles of civil society organisations in the areas of gender equality, trade, ﬁnance, food sovereignty, human and social rights should help
Africa come up with its own development paradigm.
Africa and Africans should reclaim the debate on their
development.
Is it necessary to stress again that Africa’s regional and
continental integration is one of the keys to its survival and
long-term development? Because only a collective and concerted effort can help Africa overcome the multiple obstacles
that lie on the road to an endogenous, people-centred, democratic and sustainable development.

It can be done through selling bags of subsidized compost, but at the current price of £10 for a 25 kilo sack, organic pig-feed justifies the transport a lot more than organic compost.
The return of the backyard pig will not only sort out our food waste problems more importantly it will enhance the cultural life of the nation. The pig has always been a mainstay of the poor family’s independence and of a community’s food sovereignty. ‘Pigs for health’ was an English expression; ‘the pig pays the rent’ an Irish one. It is because of the centrality of the pig to the security and the aspirations of settled peasants – be they Papuan tribesmen, the labourers of Larkrise, or the negroes of Maryland – that its life, its death and its afterlife are invariably imbued with ritual or religious significance.34 ‘Stand by your Ham’ is a call that resonates more fully amongst a proud and independent peasantry than a bunch of whingeing factory farmers, some of whom have probably never cured a ham in their lives.

…

In 1997, he drew up for the FAO the table reproduced as Table 5 below which shows more graphically than any paragraph I could write how ecologically and socially damaging it is to place ownership of the world’s marine biomass in the hands of a few powerful and overcapitalized corporations.
Table 5: The World’s Two Marine Fishing Industries – How They Compare
Credit: David Thompson/FAO
The one matter that Thomson’s chart doesn’t show is who eats the fish. One can be reasonably confident that fish caught by the small scale sector are feeding local people (though not necessarily all local people) and contributing to a region’s food sovereignty. The global fleet of factory trawlers, on the other hand, is an engine for hoovering up protein in certain parts of the world and ferrying it to consumers thousands of miles away who have the wherewithal to pay for it. And the flow of protein is from the waters of people who need it to the tables of people who don’t.
Sacred Cows and Infernal Goats
The term ‘waste’ is interesting, not so much for its derivation, from the Latin vastus meaning desolate, as for the modern meanings that have subsequently been assigned to it.

After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”28
And he adds, “The tragedy here is that there are thousands of successful experiments, worldwide, showing how climate-smart agriculture can work. They’re characterized not by expensive fertilizer from Yara and proprietary seeds from Monsanto, but knowledge developed and shared by peasants freely and equitably.” And, Patel says, “In its finest moments, agroecology gets combined with ‘food sovereignty,’ with democratic control of the food system, so that not only is more food produced, but it’s distributed so that everyone gets to eat it too.”29
About That German Miracle . . .
We now have a few models to point to that demonstrate how to get far-reaching decentralized climate solutions off the ground with remarkable speed, while fighting poverty, hunger, and joblessness at the same time.

…

In fact the slogan long embraced by this movement has been “System Change, Not Climate Change”—a recognition that these are the two choices we face.67
“The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time,” Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), explains. “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.”68
This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits.

‘Nobody understands’, he said, ‘how 11 to 12 billion dollars a year [of US biofuel] subsidies in 2006 and protective [US] tariff polices have had the effect of diverting 100m tonnes of cereals from human consumption, mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuel for vehicles’.163
Worse still, state-supported biofuel expansion programmes in countries such as India and Indonesia were bringing about wide-scale deforestation (which sparked major bursts of greenhouse gases); an extension in the power of corporate agribusiness; and the forcible removal of indigenous and poor communities from their lands (which governments often class as ‘wastelands’). ‘Tens of millions of hectares worldwide have been converted to grow biofuels’, writes Almuth Ernsting. ‘Hundreds of millions of hectares are being eyed by biofuel corporations and lobbyists. The land-grab now underway has devastating impacts on food sovereignty and food security’.164
In response, mass evictions and mass protests have become common. Indonesia’s indigenous Orang Rimba community, for example, has held demonstrations against the deforestation of the Sumatran rain forest – which had sustained their semi-nomadic livelihoods for centuries – for biofuel palm-oil monoculture (Figure 9.14). As a result, many Orang Rimba ‘are [now] forced to beg or take food from plantations where they are vulnerable to violence, and they suffer from hunger and malnutrition’.165
9.14 Orang Rimba indigenous groups protesting against the takeover of their lands by biofuel plantations in Indonesia’s Jambi province.

When famines do occur (as, sadly, they too often do), it is invariably due to social and political causes. The last great famine in China, which may have killed some 20 million people at the time of the ‘great leap forward’, occurred precisely because China was then by political choice isolated from the world market. Such an event could not now happen in China. This should be a salutary lesson for all those who place their anti-capitalist faith on the prospects for local food sovereignty, local self-sufficiency and decoupling from the global economy. Freeing ourselves from the chains of an international division of labour organised for the benefit of capital and the imperialist powers is one thing, but decoupling from the world market in the name of anti-globalisation is a potentially suicidal alternative.
The central contradiction in capital’s use of the division of labour is not technical but social and political.

In 2005, the Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements, a coalition of farmers from around the country, wrote a letter to the prime minister summarizing their demands in the face of the emergency: “The dumping of these agricultural commodities led to depression in the domestic farmgate prices, which led to a deep agrarian crisis and caused increased cases of farmers’ suicides... We believe that the very structure of WTO rules therefore distorts trade against small farmers, against food sovereignty and against trade justice. That is why we gave a call for the removal of agriculture from WTO... Agriculture in India is not an industry. It is the main source of livelihood for 70% of the population of the country. We therefore demand from the Indian government to quit from WTO. We also demand that agriculture should be out of WTO.”119 As I finalize this book in late 2009, farmers throughout India are continuing to fight with increasing desperation to protect their livelihoods and save their economy from being the latest casualty of the WTO.

This cable reveals that the embassy saw business support as a potential way to “balance” the “competing interests” behind the Constituent Assembly [07QUITO768].
Despite the efforts of the US embassy, voters approved the proposal for a Constituent Assembly with 80 percent of the vote, and gave Correa’s party a majority of the seats in the assembly. The new constitution—which contained numerous progressive initiatives, such as enshrining the rights of nature, treating drug abuse as a health issue, and food sovereignty—was approved with 64 percent of the vote.19 While the US ultimately proved unsuccessful in preventing Correa’s rise, the cables reveal the embassy’s clear intention to thwart the public’s will.
The concerns of the United States about Correa, and its activities against Ecuador’s progressive movement, did not end with the election of President Obama, however. In January 2009, Ambassador Heather Hodges wrote: “Over the past two months, Correa has taken an increasingly leftist, anti-American posture, apparently unconcerned that his actions would result in frayed ties with the United States.”